There had to have been an audio component to the CGI too. I was two blocks away and heard the second plane go in.

Maybe there were giant loudspeakers set up nearby broadcasting the sound of a jumbo jet flying perilously low overhead. If so, the plotters did a great job. The audio was really convincing.

Anyone who’s stuck by Wood on his election trutherism despite his flirtations with QAnon and assorted insanity probably won’t cut him loose upon discovering that he’s a 9/11 Truther. But I offer the clip anyway in the spirit of hope.

The crowd is quiet during his spiel, which I imagine is uncommon for him. Maybe they were caught off-guard by this digression from the usual ramblings about “The Storm” or Xi Jinping changing the vote totals or whatever. But it must have been unnerving for a demagogue who was trying to whip up his audience to be received with silence.

Lin Wood says that the planes that hit the twin towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 were fake CGI. pic.twitter.com/H8amh8luzp

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) October 2, 2021

It’s obviously not true that no plane fragments were found at the crash sites. They were still finding parts at Ground Zero more than a decade after the towers fell. The remains of Flight 93 filled four shipping containers when they were finally buried at the Shanksville memorial site in 2018. Stuff like that is easily checkable but Wood is fundamentally a storyteller and that detail doesn’t fit in the story he wants to tell.

His flourish at the end about George W. Bush is interesting if only because Bush is poised to become a more central enemy to MAGA over the next year as he helps Liz Cheney try to fend off the Trump-led primary challenge to her in Wyoming. I wonder if we’ll see more “Bush did 9/11” propaganda because of it from the most febrile elements of righty populism as Cheney’s election approaches. That would only help her make her case that the populist forces behind Trumpism are bad for the country but it won’t stop Wood.

It might lead Trump to be more cautious about associating with conspiracy theorists, though, not wanting to make it easier for critics to associate them with his movement. The Daily Beast reported a few days ago that his inner circle has made Sidney Powell persona non grata:

Two lawyers who currently work for Trump or in the former president’s inner orbit say they want absolutely nothing to do with her and have cautioned others in MAGAland to do the same. One said they’d recently deleted her phone number.

Two other people familiar with the matter said that ever since he left office in January, certain advisers and longtime associates to Trump have kept an informal shortlist of people who they should look out for, including at Trump’s private clubs or offices in Florida, New Jersey, and New York. The point of this roster is to intercept and possibly rebuff attempted outreach, visits, or phone calls from a handful of conservative figures who could bring the ex-president more undesired headaches.

“Sidney is very much on the no-go list,” one of the knowledgeable sources said. “Her problems right now do not need to be the [former] president’s problems.”

She’ll work her way back into his circle. She’s an ardent true believer in the thing he most wants to believe in all the world, that voters preferred him to Joe Biden after all. He won’t be able to resist having her tell him what he wants to hear for very long.

As for Wood, I’m curious to know if there are conspiracy theories that are too far for him. Moon landing was faked? Holocaust didn’t happen? I’d guess he would draw the line at flat-Earth-ism, but you never know. We may found out: He’ll be riffing before admiring crowds for years to come.